Sunday, April 30, 2017

Writing for Children &
for Young Adults ~ the world’s hottest marketSee current listings for Writing Kid Lit weekly classes and one-day Saturday workshops here. See Brian Henry's complete current schedule of classes and workshops here.

This
workshop is also offered Saturday, May 27, in St.
Catharines, with Anne Shone, senior editor, Scholastic Books (seehere), and Saturday, Aug 12, in Collingwood, with Monica Pacheco, literary agent with the McDermid Agency (see here).

If you want to write the next
best-selling children’s books or
just want to create stories for your own kids, this workshop is for you. Learn
how to write stories kids and young adults will love and find out what you need
to know to sell your book.

Special option:You
may, but don't have to, bring 3 copies of the opening pages (first
500 words) of your children’s book or young adult novel (or 1,000 words if that
will get you to the end of your picture book or to the end of your first
chapter.) If you’re not currently working on a children’s story, don’t worry,
we’ll get you started on the spot!

Guest speaker Yasemin Uçaris a Senior Editor at Kids Can Press. Yasemin has been a children’s book editor for close to twenty years. She worked at Scholastic Canada before moving to London, UK, in 2001, where she worked as a Senior Editor at Piccadilly Press. In 2006, she moved back to Toronto and worked as a freelance editor for a number of years before joining Kids Can Press in 2012.

Yasemin has worked with many popular and award-winning authors and illustrators, including internationally bestselling author Louise Rennison, Ashley Spires, Barbara Coloroso and Caroline Adderson.

Guest speakerJennifer Mook-Sanggrew up on the shores of tropical Guyana and moved to Canada when she was fourteen. She lived an ordinary life in search of treasure until she found the beginnings of a story in one of Brian Henry's classes. That story grew into the humorous middle-grade novelSpeechless,published by Scholastic in 2015.

Speechless was shortlisted for many awards, and recommended by the Ontario Library Association, the Canadian Childrens’ Book Centre, the CBC, and the TD Summer Reading Club.

Her picture bookCaptain Monty Takes the Plunge will be released in the fall of 2017 by Kids Can Press.

Jennifer enjoys visiting schools and libraries to talk about the three RRRs - Reading, wRiting and procRastination. She loves sunshine and sand and, though quite fond of the letter “R,” her favourite letter has always been “the C.” Jennifer lives in Burlington, Ontario. You can find out more about her athttp://jennifermooksang.com/.Speechless is available online here.

Workshop leader Brian Henry has been a book editor and creative writing instructor for more than 25 years. He teaches at Ryerson University and has led workshops everywhere from Boston to Buffalo and from Sarnia to Saint John. He publishes Quick Brown Fox, Canada’s most popular blog for writers and is the author of a children’s version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Tribute Publishing). But his proudest boast is that he has helped many of his students get published.Workshop fee: 43.36 + 13% hst =49 + $6 for pizza lunch = $55

paid in advance by mail or in person

or 46.90 + 13% hst = 53 + $6 for pizza lunch =$59at the door

To pay in advance, make your cheque out to the Caledon Public Library, and mail it to:

Friday, April 28, 2017

For as long as I can remember, they’ve always been
there. As we left Maynooth, usually after stopping for gas and an ice cream on the
first long weekend of summer, we’d see them dangling by their laces from the
telephone wire above the only road that led into and out of town – a pair of denim
blue sneakers. They were a family landmark.

My parents had bought
the cottage 25 years before. It was a homecoming of sorts for my dad. He was born
in the backcountry of the Barry’s Bay hills to Polish immigrants enticed to
Canada by the promise of farmland if they were willing to clear the treed
terrain. After the end of the war, my dad left Barry’s Bay for Toronto to start
fresh, establishing a general contracting business and marrying my mom – a city
girl from Montreal assigned to write my father, a stranger, as part of the war
effort.

My parents surprised us
one night after Sunday dinner as my mom was clearing our plates from the table.
“We bought a place on Kaminiskeg,” my father said matter-of-factly.

My three sisters and
brother – all in our teens or early twenties – looked forward to the parties
we’d host and the indoor plumbing the cottage had, unlike the our grandfather’s
house closer to town where, as kids, we’d spent most of our time in Barry’s Bay.

As the Friday night
drive up north became more familiar, we would note the usual landmarks guiding
our travel north: the chicken coop near leaning dangerously toward the ground outside
of the town of Burleigh Falls, the sign announcing the town of Bancroft, the
last major town on route 62 before our destination. Then between here and there,
the town of Maynooth, and finally, as we exited town, the dangling sneakers.

Maynooth wasn’t a place
to write home about. Highway 62 was the main road in and out of this town,
which had a gas station, an ice cream bar, and the shoes. My older sister, ever
the authority, would say matter-of-factly that a drunken man had pitched them up
there in a stupor one night walking home from the Legion.

My younger and more
mischievous brother imagined a kid like himself taking revenge on a school
bully, launching his coveted Chuck Taylors over the line. My dad dryly said
some lad was keeping them there for safekeeping until he needed them again. We
all had our theories.

The shoes were always a
topic of conversation as we gassed up and hit the black top, anxious to make
the final stretch to the lake. The first one to see them would squeal, “They’re
still there!” as we rode underneath the phone line stretching above the highway.
On our first trip up every the spring, the shoes were always a highly coveted
sighting.

This tradition continued
as we invited our friends up to the cottage for parentless weekends. We had
gotten used to the shoes hanging on that wire, convinced they weren’t ever
going away. The shoes took on an air of nostalgia as we entertained our friends
with theories of their origin. The shoes became an omen of good things to come
at the cottage and the omen was rarely wrong.

Those shoes on the
telephone wire outlasted my dad who stopped going up to the cottage soon after
his ALS diagnosis as he became frailer and less mobile. I’d visit him in his
care home and report that the shoes were still on the line in Maynooth.

St. Hedwig's, Barrry's Bay, Ontario

Always a man of few
words and with a disease robbing him of his body but not his mind, he’d get a twinkle
in his eye, and with a slow shake of his head in disbelief, he’d erupt into
uncontrollable laughter.

The shoes were on the
wire on his final journey home to the cemetery in Barry’s Bay.

Nearly 25 years since we
first packed up the cars on a Friday night, I’m still making the trip to
Barry’s Bay, now with my two girls riding in the back seat.

Freda shouts, “Are we
stopping at the store?” She means the ice cream store in Maynooth and she
already knows the answer – they just have to promise to save room for grandma’s
chicken noodle soup, which will be warm on the stove when we arrive. Monica
giggles and the twinkle in her eye is the same as her grandfather’s.

As we drive out of town
with chocolate-stained lips and sticky hands, we anticipate our usual landmark.
The three of us are dumfounded as we cross under the telephone wire. The girls turn
their little bodies around quickly to get a second look out the back of the
truck at the empty wire. I peer at them in the rearview mirror and our wide
eyes meet as the girls turn back toward me. They shoes are gone.

“I guess he finally came
back and got them!” I tell my girls.

Pausing, uncertain if I’m
kidding, they at last erupt into giggles. We start a new tradition that day, exchanging
stories of what happens to the shoes next.

Christine Maika is an Improvement Lead with the Canadian Foundation for Healthcare
Improvement. In her work, she advocates for health system redesign informed by
the lived experience of patients and their families, often shared through
storytelling and other engagement techniques.
She is an editor and contributing author of a book released in December
2016 titled Patient Engagement –
Catalyzing Improvement and Innovation in Healthcare. Christine is
completing her Master’s in Public Health part-time and lives in Ottawa.

Note: You can also attend this workshop on Saturday, July 22, in London. See here.

Accessible to beginnersand meaty enough for
experienced writers, this workshop will show you how to use dialogue to
make your stories more dynamic and dramatic.Whether
you’re writing fiction or memoir, you need to be able to write great dialogue
that both sounds natural and packs dramatic punch, and you need to know how to
mix your dialogue and narrative so that your characters come alive. Come
to this workshop and learn both the basics and the best tricks of the trade.

Workshop leader Brian Henry has
been a book editor and creative writing instructor for more than 25 years. He
publishes Quick Brown Fox, Canada’s most popular blog for
writers, teaches creative writing at Ryerson University and has led workshops
everywhere from Boston to Buffalo and from Sarnia to St. John. But his
proudest boast is that he has helped many of
his students get published.

Read a review of "How to write
great dialogue" here.
For more reviews of Brian's weekly courses and Saturday workshops seehereandscroll down.

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

A Family Matter is Chris Laing's third novel in this post-WWII
mystery series featuring Max Dexter and Isabel O’Brien.

Max’s mother returns to Hamilton after an
absence of twenty-some years. Max is not anxious to meet with her – why should
he be after she’d abandoned him as a child? But a bigger question looms: is she
involved in an internal mob war now heating up and about to explode?

If you can't make the book launch, A Family Matter is available through Chapters / Indigo here. and the two other Max Dexter mysteries, A deadly Venture and A Private Man, plus Chris's short story collection, West End Kid: Tales from the Forties, are available here.

I want to go to the writing retreat, but don’t drive. If anyone’s going from somewhere in the London area,
I’d love to go with you. I’ll split the gas money, of course, and provide good
company on the way up and back.

I just received a confirmation letter fromPrairie Firefor
my short story that will be published in their spring anthology. And they pay!
Cool! And I submitted my first picture book manuscript to Owlkids Books and have one more
close to completion to submit.

The
Harvestershas been nominated for
an Aurora award – a truly wonderful honour from the Canadian Science Fiction
and Fantasy Association. (You can check out the nominations here.)

The eureka
moment for this sci-fi novel occurred while attending one of your
seminars for help with another book, for which I will always be grateful.

See you
at your next seminar!

Dianne Waye

(writing as
J. D. Waye)

You can buy
The Harvesters and Dianne’s other books at
MuseItUp Publishing here.

Hello, Brian.

I have been
meaning to write you for a couple of reasons. The first, is to thank you for
Quick Brown Fox and to let you know that I achieved one of my goals this year
through your site. I learned of Alanna Rusnak's new Blank Spaces Magazine and was able to get my first piece (ever!) of
flash fiction published!

I wanted to
thank you for the work you do helping people like me find their footing in what
can be a challenging industry to navigate. As a beginner writer, I find the
links and resources on your website very useful.

Kids
Can Press seeks picture books and nonfiction manuscripts for
children, as well as chapter books for ages 7–10. They do not accept young
adult fiction or fantasy novels.

Yasemin Uçar is a Senior Editor at Kids Can Press. Yasemin
has been a children’s book editor for close to twenty years. She worked at
Scholastic Canada before moving to London, UK, in 2001, where she worked as a
Senior Editor at Piccadilly Press. In 2006, she moved back to Toronto and
worked as a freelance editor for a number of years before joining Kids Can
Press in 2012.

Yasemin has worked with many popular and
award-winning authors and illustrators, including internationally bestselling
author Louise Rennison author of Angus
Thongs & Full-Frontal Snogging and other Georgia Nicolson books),
Ashley Spires, Barbara Coloroso and Caroline Adderson.

Note: Yasemin Uçar will be one of the guest speaker at the “Writing for
Children & for Young Adults”
workshop on Saturday, May 13, in Caledon (see here). “Writing for Children & for Young Adults”
workshops are also offered Saturday, May 27, in St. Catharines, with Anne
Shone, senior editor, Scholastic Books (see here) and Saturday, July 29, in Collingwood, with
literary agent Monica Pacheco (see here).

Andersen Pressis
a specialist children's publisher. They publish picture books (500–1000 words),
juvenile fiction (3,000–5,000 words), and older fiction up to 75,000 words.
Submit a synopsis and the first three chapters by mail.

“Our list includes
sumptuous colouring books – from the pocket-sizedI Heart Colouring series,
toThe Book of Beasts,
a stunning, fully-foiled hardback with information about mythical monsters as well
as images to colour.

“We always seek to
bring a new twist to established genres – check outThe Colossal Creature Count, an epic creature-counting
challenge, orColourtronic, a
colour-by-numbers activity book that produces unexpectedly striking results.
There’sDress Up Taylor Swift, which offers stylish stickers
andPainty Printswhich needs inky fingerprints to
complete charming pictures. Kids are even encouraged toDestroy This Book in the Name of Science, a book full
of fun, interactive science projects.”

~ Philippa Wingate,
Publishing Director, Buster Books

Submissions of
fiction and nonfiction ideas are welcome from authors, compilers and
illustrators. No picture book or poetry submissions.

David
Fickling Books:For nearly twelve years DFB was run as an imprint – first as part of
Scholastic, then of Random House. Now they are an independent business, DFB
Storyhouse. Theypublish 12–20
titles a year. But while they are always open to submissions from agents, they
are open to submissions directly from authors only occasionally.

Floris
Books is an independent publishing company
based in Edinburgh, Scotland. They publish books in two main areas:
nonfiction works for adults that draw on the work of Rudolf Steiner or that would be of interest to the Steiner-Waldorf
community, and Scottish themed books for
children ages 2–15, including picture books, chapter books, middle grade and
young teens.

Hogs
Back Booksis a small
publishing house that publishes picture books for kids up to 10 years old, both
fiction and nonfiction. Hogs Back welcomes texts directly from authors and from literary
agents. They are also always on the lookout for illustrators who can produce
original ideas and beautifully executed work to bring their stories to life.

Little
Tiger Group is a small publisher that has has been publishing
children’s books for over 25 years. At this time only its Stripes Publishing imprint is accepting
unsolicited manuscripts. Stripes publishes
fiction for children aged 6–12 years and for teenagers.

All
three Little Tiger imprints (Little Tiger, Stripes, and Caterpillar) are
looking for illustrators. Full guidelines here.

Mantra
Lingua specializes in dual language
resources for bilingual children and parents
and for the multi-lingual classroom. They make books and other resources in 66
languages. They are always looking for translators, illustrators, writers and
creators.

Maverick
Children’s Booksis a new children’s book
publisher, established in 2009, that’s growing rapidly, with 36 books scheduled
to be published in 2017. It accepts unsolicited submissions.

Picture
Books: maximum 650 words, stories in either rhyme or prose (but no poetry) and they prefer quirky. Full
guidelines here.

Junior
Books for ages 7 – 10 years, 6,000 – 18,000 words. Again, they are looking for
something a little quirky (“Sweet stories about fluffy kittens and lost puppies
are just not our thing – sorry”), and something with series potential is a
bonus. Full guidelines here.

And don't
miss the June in Algonquin Writing Retreat, Friday, June
2 – Sunday, June 4 or Monday, June 5, at Arowhon Pines Resort. Details here.

Other
upcoming workshops include: “You can write great dialogue,” Saturday,
June 10 in Guelph, with author Hannah McKinnon, (see here) and
Saturday, July 22, in London (see here) and “How to
Write Great Characters,” Saturday, June 17 in Burlington (see here).

For more
information or to reserve a spot in any Saturday workshop or weekly course,
email: brianhenry@sympatico.ca

Brian Henry has been a book editor, writer, and creative writing instructor for more than 25 years. He teaches creative writing at Ryerson University. He also leads weekly creative writing courses in Burlington, Mississauga, Oakville and Georgetown and conducts Saturday workshops throughout Ontario. His proudest boast is that he has helped many of his students get published.